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Ford’s ‘inquiry’ into Liberal wrongdoing has fallen flat

A sweeping call for emails and documents. Witnesses called to testify about the state of the provincial deficit — what they knew and when. Throw in, as Premier Doug Ford does regularly, suggestions of political corruption and cover-ups and it all starts to sound pretty serious.

And what have we learned after weeks of hearings and questioning by the Progressive Conservative-controlled select committee on financial transparency?

Essentially, nothing. At least nothing of substance that we didn’t know already.

That’s hardly a surprise. Despite Ford’s excitable tweet this week — “the people deserve to know the truth!” — this committee wasn’t set up to discover “the truth” about the former Liberal government’s fair hydro plan, pension accounting, or any other truth for that matter.

The people know the truth. They always have.

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Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals, rocked by political headwinds, decided to borrow billions to reduce electricity bills, and they accounted for that borrowed money on the books of Crown-owned Ontario Power Generation.

Was it the best financial move they could have made? Probably not. But it was the government of the day’s legitimate and open attempt to respond to the growing concerns around high electricity bills.

It was never part of a spending scheme so “reckless and inappropriate” that some Liberals belonged in jail for it, as Ford has suggested. Indeed, his government is continuing the Liberal rebate program to reduce electricity bills.

It just moved the borrowed money onto the government’s books. And that, along with adopting a different accounting method for public sector pension assets, helped the Ford government artificially inflate the provincial deficit from $6.7 billion to a high of $15 billion, before claiming to reduce it by $500 million in its fall fiscal update.

Ford and his ministers have used this inflated deficit figure as a handy excuse for the cuts to government spending they’ve already made, and they’ll use it to justify the cuts that are undoubtedly still to come. Beyond that, it’s given them something to continue kicking the Liberals for, which becomes ever more pointless the longer the PCs are in power.

The people that Ford loves to reference passed their judgement on the Wynne Liberals in the last election. That’s why Ford and the Progressive Conservatives have a solid majority government. And yet he just can’t seem to accept the victory.

These committee hearings — along with the commission of inquiry into Ontario’s finances and the report by financial consultants that preceded them — are, at best, a fishing expedition to feed Ford’s seemingly insatiable thirst to find something else to blame on the Liberals.

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The government stacked the deck with six PC and three New Democrat members. And it has refused to call witnesses who might not hold to the script, including Ontario’s chief accountant who recently resigned over the government’s use of pension assets to artificially inflate the deficit. And still, they haven’t unearthed the malfeasance that Ford never tires of suggesting is there.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath rightly called this committee nothing but “a dog-and-pony show” when Ford unveiled it back in September. And, after sitting through the hearings that started in October, NDP finance critic and committee member Sandie Shaw says “no smoking gun” has emerged.

She spent two and half hours answering questions about what she did, when she did it and why. And, as she noted, it’s all been hashed out in the public realm before so she certainly had no problem repeating it all before the committee.

Mercifully, this waste of time, not to mention taxpayer dollars, should be coming to end shortly. The committee was mandated to deliver its final report this month.

This is Ford’s third failed kick at the same can. It really should be his last.

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